What’s the takeaway?
Mercy follows Chris Raven, a detective who petitioned to establish the mercy program. An AI that plays judge, jury and executioner for crimes. The idea is that this is supposed to lessen the burden on humans and cut down on crime. Everyone has to mandatorily upload their devices to the cloud, and this AI has access to everything in order to solve cases. Some might say this sounds good, and Chris did…until he became the next case. He is put on trial for the murder of his wife. He is not a perfect person, but he knows he would never hurt his wife, so he tries to solve the case within an hour and a half. If he doesn’t, he dies.
This is a bottle movie. Most of it takes place with Chris sitting in a chair in one single room. It’s not until the end that he leaves. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, honestly. I quite like movies like that; it gives the creators a chance to try interesting things. And I feel like with the visuals, it kept me engaged and entertained in that aspect. Now the writing is a different matter.
I thought the overall premise was interesting. I was interested in the mystery aspect of Chris trying to solve the murder, but I don’t know what the main message of the movie was. It seems like it wants to say AI is bad at first because it made a mistake, but then the AI helps chris and he says that you can learn, so maybe it’s saying that AI is good? I’m just not sure what stance the movie is taking on this topic. especially with it being so topical right now i was curious to see what they did with it, and the answer is…not much.
overall if you’re going in for an alright mystery movie i think this will do the trick. I’d give it lie a 5/10, just kinda middle of the road, not sure if I’m interested in a rewatch now that I know the twist. You can check out more in the trailer below, but be careful, it does spoil… a lot.
-Jared Gomes
